My digital comic book composed of DAZ products!

Comments

A little post work; because the image was rendered without a mask, the outline is a bit screwed up around the hair, but this is part 2 page 32 from your render and then run through my filters in Photoshop CS2..

Unfortunately, the letters were also handmade.
at the time I wrote straight into balloons.
I just scan these pages today, and used image editor now to redimenssionar the ideal size accepted by daz forum.
unfortunately

Brazilian Portuguese to Spanish is more easy :). I enjoy this page from your comic.

not saying what any one should or should not do.
not giving any kind of advise.
just giving out some info.

adobe now has creative cloud deals.
affordable monthly deals.

there is topazlabs.
there is filter forge.

if I was going for realism I would ask the the ones that make scfi movies and scfi TV like the shows on syfy.
what render engines are the best for space & scfi.
Lightwave does a lot of scfi and some of the syfy shows used Lightwave.

if I was converting 3D in to 2D comics.
I would use filters .topaz are my fav so far.

some high end app's & zBrush have some killer shaders.

DAZ Studio does have GoZ for zBrush
zBrush has a lot to offer for a lot of different reasons.

check out maxon C4D or autodesk Max then Lightwave price won't seem that bad.
Blenders free.
DAZ has Carrara http://www.daz3d.com/software/carrara
you could just ask what are some rendering tricks to get that sci fi look with any render engine.
I like DAZ Studio render engine set on 4.

Unfortunately, the letters were also handmade.
at the time I wrote straight into balloons.
I just scan these pages today, and used image editor now to redimenssionar the ideal size accepted by daz forum.
unfortunately

Brazilian Portuguese to Spanish is more easy :). I enjoy this page from your comic.

Hmm!!Thank you.
Nowadays, when someone asks me a job in style handmade I only use "Akvis Sketch", it's easy, it's fast!
akvis sketch as it is handmade, I just need to have the rendered image.
see in the image below:

That's interesting, but I have no idea what you mean by a faux ink technique. Can you elaborate a little more on that?

Sure. I opened your third image in GIMP and spent five minutes playing around with filters. My take on your image is by no means what I would do personally. I could spend an hour or two fiddling with settings to get it just right. I wanted to give an idea of what could be possible. You can play around with settings for one image and then batch process the rest with those same settings automatically.

Edit: I forgot to say what filters I used. First, I used 'Curves' to brighten things up a bit. I used the 'Cartoon' filter. I resized the image to be much larger. I used the 'Newsprint' filter. I resized the image back to near original size. That's it.

I think this is a good effect. It helps get the images out of the "uncanny valley" and makes it clear that the flat lighting is a part of the style.

Outlining isn't the only option, either. I note that Experience Anomaly goes for a "painted" style, probably done in postwork. It's a good choice, because it gives a distinctive look to the art and emphasizes the strength of the artist, rather than the limitations of 3D renders. Photoshop has a couple of filters that can apply this sort of effect easily. So does the GIMP, with the advantage that you can script the process so you can have GIMP process all your images in a queue while you go have supper or whatever.

Here's a series of stacked renders I combined into a screen for a video game I've been tinkering with... these use pwToon, no postwork (other than stacking PNG files). (This is a screenshot of the LiveCode development environment-- it was part of an article about coding I was writing at the time.)

Another thing that can not go unnoticed in the production of comics, are the lines of motion.
how comic books are images "static", these are motion lines that give the illusion of motion, speed, velocity, displacement, impact, etc., etc..
they give life to art.
without these lines, the characters seem just mannequins posing (I'm saying this in general for all kinds of comics, please no one take offense).
I am preparing some scenes now with M3, to explain better.
Shortly, will be ready to post them here.

Oh, I know, Been trying to figure out how to do motion lines in photoshop. The best program for motion lines is Manga Studio. In youtube, they show how pretty easy it is to do them in the program.

I do know in DeviantArt, there is someone who was kind enough to make brushes of motion lines. Look under screentone or motion lines for manga. Believe me motion lines or "drama" line make a world of difference.

When it comes to showing motion in my comics, I use large words by means of Comic Life 2. Here are three successive panels from the Max Rogers comic. (Personally, I would love to be able to use Dreamlight's Motion Master product, but it doesn't work in DAZ 4.5. If anyone has any other ideas how to add lines, I'd love to hear them!)

Might I recommend motion blur for scenes like that? You don't need to do it in render, you can do it in postwork. Render out the moving part with a transparent background and blur a copy of it on the axis of its movement. You can then overlay this onto your main scene and it will look more dynamic. Text alone doesn't really have the same impact, and for things like movement you really need to show rather than tell.

One group I found on Deviant Art has some fantastic examples of CG comics. Everything from sci-fi to fantasy. You could do worse than to check it out and perhaps take some tips on improving your own work.

Here are three successive panels from the Max Rogers comic. (Personally, I would love to be able to use Dreamlight's Motion Master product, but it doesn't work in DAZ 4.5. If anyone has any other ideas how to add lines, I'd love to hear them!)

The second panel would be really well suited for motion lines. Vertical motion lines to show the Razorbeast's descent downward. This can be done in postwork. If you're using Windows, MS Paint is included. There's a line tool. If you hold down the SHIFT key while moving the mouse, you get perfect vertical lines (or perfect horizontal / 45 degrees lines). Most graphic programs I've used with a line tool seem to follow this convention with the SHIFT key.

A point of caution is to not over do it. This includes both motion lines and motion blurs. I was looking at a comic book and it looked like the colorist got a new toy and couldn't stop playing with it . . . . in every panel. One panel shows a gaussian blur applied to the background. Next panel had 2 characters with the gaussian blur applied to the character further away from the reader. The following panel only had one character but had both arms showing. So the colorist applied the gaussian blur to the arm that was further away. Maybe the colorist thought this would make the comic look more 3D, but it just became annoying to look at.

Back to your 3 successive panels. I don't know how you're envisioning your comic so this is just my way of doing things. Perhaps you wanted the same camera angle on Razorbeast with changes in the background to show it moving along. Or you may have wanted to play homage to Frankenstein's monster. But Razorbeast looks stiff in the 3 panel sequence. The pose below shows a substitute for panel 2. By using a different camera angle, you can have a more dynamic image of descending, assuming Razorbeast is that flexible. With this pose and angle, you can create an illusion of motion without motion lines.

I'm surprised at the number of people suggesting a toon shader to convert a 3D looking image into a 2D looking image. Perhaps it's the idea of what a traditional comic book is suppose to look like.

Back when DC had their Zuda imprint competition, I hand drew my entry, scanned it into my computer, and colored it digitally. I wanted my entry to stand out from the competition so I spent a lot of time digitally coloring it, trying to make it look more and more 3D.

And here it's the reverse. We have 3D and the goal is to make it look 2D. :gulp:

I'm surprised at the number of people suggesting a toon shader to convert a 3D looking image into a 2D looking image. Perhaps it's the idea of what a traditional comic book is suppose to look like.

Back when DC had their Zuda imprint competition, I hand drew my entry, scanned it into my computer, and colored it digitally. I wanted my entry to stand out from the competition so I spent a lot of time digitally coloring it, trying to make it look more and more 3D.

And here it's the reverse. We have 3D and the goal is to make it look 2D. :gulp:

Interesting . . . .

Well, I made that suggestion based on the fact that the o. p. doesn't want to get into lighting setups. In that case it seems reasonable to me to go for the flatter 2 D look instead of something that looks like preproduction storyboarding for a TV show.

I'm surprised at the number of people suggesting a toon shader to convert a 3D looking image into a 2D looking image. Perhaps it's the idea of what a traditional comic book is suppose to look like.

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, the manga "look" carries its own cultural context, and I would like to include that in many of my projects. If I could just draw manga images, I would. Unfortunately I have two obstacles in that regard: I have trouble converting from 3D to 2D (I think in 3D) and my hands shake. Between those two factors, I've never been able to put in the practice required to get good at drawing. For me, the best path to getting decent 2D images in the style I want is to work from 3D models.

Might I recommend motion blur for scenes like that? You don't need to do it in render, you can do it in postwork. Render out the moving part with a transparent background and blur a copy of it on the axis of its movement. You can then overlay this onto your main scene and it will look more dynamic. Text alone doesn't really have the same impact, and for things like movement you really need to show rather than tell.

One group I found on Deviant Art has some fantastic examples of CG comics. Everything from sci-fi to fantasy. You could do worse than to check it out and perhaps take some tips on improving your own work.

The effects that I posted, were not rendered, no. only M3 was rendered in poser. The rest is all postwork.
Motion blur only works as a part of the process, but not alone.
see in this picture below, I applied motion blur, and lines:

When it comes to showing motion in my comics, I use large words by means of Comic Life 2. Here are three successive panels from the Max Rogers comic. (Personally, I would love to be able to use Dreamlight's Motion Master product, but it doesn't work in DAZ 4.5. If anyone has any other ideas how to add lines, I'd love to hear them!)

This also works well for fight scenes: POW! SOK!

That's BEO Reaper, although I renamed the character Razorbeast.

Ohh galactica1981!...Dear...You are confused!!
This is onomatopoeia. that's the "sound" of comics.
Onomatopoeia means imitating a sound with a phoneme or word. Noises, shouting, singing animals, nature sounds, noise machines, the timbre of the human voice are part of the universe of onomatopoeia. For example, for the Tupi Indians and tak tatak mean to snap or hit and tek is the sound of something breaking.
When we say that a cricket makes "cri cri" or hit the door and do "toc toc", we are using onomatopoeia.